


I Never Thought Anyone Like You Could Exist

by fresne



Category: Man of Steel (2013)
Genre: F/M, Yuletide 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 10:45:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 3,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5372450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clark didn't just turn his face to the sun. He closed his eyes and bent his entire body to that light. He felt the strength and the power that the sun gave him. Breathed in Earth's nurturing air. Invisible. Unnoticeable, until it wasn't there. </p><p>He turned when he heard her laugh.</p><p>Lois was falling from the sky and laughing as she fell. He shouldn't have understood why, after she'd fallen out of the sky so many times, Lois had taken up skydiving.</p><p>He smiled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What's That Up in the Sky?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Spacecadet72](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spacecadet72/gifts).



> Hopefully, this what you were looking for in the fluff department. As I was looking around your tumblr to get a sense of what to write you, I saw that you'd reposted this gif. I took my breeze of consciousness from there.
> 
> Final two quoted lines from the story come from the text under the [linked gif](http://clarkent.tumblr.com/post/132193490107/i-never-thought-anyone-like-you-could-exist).

Clark flew past the clouds. He'd broken sound when he'd left the skin of the world.

The sound a snap he carried with him. Harder to leave behind.

He could out run a bullet. He was as free as anyone could ever be. He was alone. A pop of movement against a dull blue sky. He went faster. But he couldn't out run himself.

Clark didn't just turn his face to the sun. He closed his eyes and bent his entire body to that light. He felt the strength and the power that the sun gave him. Breathed in Earth's nurturing air. Invisible. Unnoticeable, until it wasn't there. His hands curled into fists. But that didn't crush the memory of what had happened.

He'd grown up on a farm. Farmers had to be comfortable with death. Farmers and soldiers. Clark wasn't either. All the freedom to choose and Zod's last words echoing in his ears.

He turned when he heard her laugh.

Lois was falling from the sky and laughing as she fell. He shouldn't have understood why, after she'd fallen out of the sky so many times, Lois had taken up skydiving.

He smiled.

Lois had spread her arms wide and fell. He watched her chute bloom in a fragile puff. Such a delicate thing to hold a person aloft. Still falling, but drifting now back to the skin of the world.

He came closer. She was still laughing. She said, "Imagine meeting you here."

"Imagine," he said and dipped closer.

She swatted him on the shoulder. He flew farther away so she could manage her descent.

Lois ran as she reached the earth. She ran and laughed up at him.

That was the sound he carried with him as he flew away to save a tanker foundering in a storm half a world away.


	2. Into the Redwoods

Lois wrestled the wrapper of a food bar into one of Redwood National Forest's green trashcans, which were designed to thwart racoons and annoy humans. "Remember what we talked about. Mild mannered."

Clark looked at Lois over the rims of his thick black glasses. Lois wondered if she should start wearing glasses. They made a great prop. He said, "Lois, I grew up in Kansas. I know how to be mild mannered."

She snorted at him and wondered if he'd met himself. "I mean it. No heroics. No…" she pointed at him, "catching bullets. This is my story. My contact. Nothing to do with Mr. Saves the Day."

Clark spread his hands wide. "Perry's the one who wanted me to work with you on this one."

She groaned, remembering Perry's smirk. "As punishment for my sins I'm supposed to mentor you." She stabbed the black macadam of the parking lot with her walking stick. "Come on."

They headed along the well-marked trail into the woods. Lois took a few pictures for atmosphere.

They walked past signs for this or that grove of trees. Blah, blah, rich person gave money to have their name attached to some really old, really big trees. They weren't there to sightsee. They were there to write about the many pot plantations hidden on Federal land. It was a story that had been written a thousand times, but Perry wanted some new variation on it. He may as well have assigned them to report on speakeasies as far as Lois was concerned.

She tromped down the trail. She fumed. She kept Clark at her six, because she hadn't forgotten everything Dad had taught her. They left the main trail where her contact had said they should and set off along what could only generously be called a deer trail. She stopped when she didn't hear Clark behind her.

He was looking up at a circle of trees with wide eyes behind glasses he didn't need.

She was so done with this assignment. "What? See a Ewok. That's a…"

"I know what a Ewok is Lois, and no." He waved at the trees, which was just fascinating. Trees in a forest. Imagine that. Hold the presses. They had front page material right there. "The trees in this circle are over a thousand years old." She was not going to ask him how he knew that. Although, x-ray visioning trees seemed over kill. "They're clones that budded off whatever tree was in the middle of this grove. It's what, twenty feet across."

Lois tapped her walking stick in the loamy dirt. "And?"

"Based on the size, it had to have been two thousand years old when it died. Thousands of years ago and there was a forest here full of life. These trees are basically three thousand years old. And when that first tree sprouted that Kryptonian scout ship was already frozen in the ice."

Lois snorted. "Oh, yeah. Your Fortress of Solitude." He still hadn't taken her wherever he'd stashed the ship. She wasn't bitter. She was persistent.

His smile was barely there. "I prefer it here."

"In your Forest of Solitude." She set off walking again.

Clark walked past her. "I'm not alone, and you're going the wrong way." He pointed up the other side of the small ridge, and because he really was a mild mannered smartass, headed in that direction.

Lois considered this. "Forest of Friendship.”

He turned around and walked backwards up the hill. "Forest of Fellowship."

"I'm not a fellow." She climbed over the ridge, taking care to remain under cover. "Forest of Feelings." She tried the word on for size.

"Forest of Furry creatures." He grinned at her. "Ewoks."

If he'd been paying attention, Clark might have seen the sniper who shot him, but that's why she was the experienced member of the partnership. Lois gestured for Clark to lie down like a normal person and take cover, instead of standing there like an invulnerable moron, while she negotiated with the pot farmer with the itchy trigger finger.

Franklin, which was the name of said itchy trigger fingered pot farmer, turned out to have opinions on low quality foreign pot imports, the use of federal land by citizens, splitting Northern California off into a state named Jefferson to improve tax representation, not that he paid taxes on the principle that they weren't in the Constitution, which was written on hemp paper, and almost figuratively caused Lois' death when Clark started talking about the effects of the California drought on crop yields.

Lois supposed the boy could leave the farm, but the farm never left the boy.

As they walked back through the forest, Clark said, "See, I can be mild mannered."

She shoved him companionably. "Yeah, yeah. Next time, don't get shot."

Though as she walked back past that ancient grove, she couldn't help but think how alive the world was. How dead it could have been.

As she looked at Clark, she knew he was thinking the same thing. So, she wacked his shin with her walking stick and said, "Keep moving, farm boy."


	3. Fireworks

Lois told herself that she wasn't having an office romance with Clark. She didn't even know what they were to each other. Sure, they'd kissed. He was hot, Lois was human and they'd just saved the world. It didn't have to mean anything.

He'd look up at her from his desk where he was typing at normal human speed, and she'd think very hard at him, "What did it mean?"

Clark could do a lot of things, but mind reading wasn't one of them. He'd smile. "Hungry?" Her stomach would gurgle and with Clark buying, the world was her oyster. They always walked down the street to the Crimson Empress in Chinatown and battled with chopsticks over the last pot sticker.

No one beat out Lois for the last pot sticker. No one.

Clark was on half of her by-lines. Okay, maybe a quarter. Lois didn't share the by-line lightly.

Fifth of July and he was waving a newspaper with pictures of fireworks, because the day before hadn't been enough patriotism, and never mind she'd played her Anthems of the Armed Services playlist while talking to Dad on the phone, which was patriotism turned to eleven.

Clark didn't say he'd gone to Smallville for their little parade. He didn't need to. He was grinning it, because he'd been in the parade. As Clark. Small town like that, at some point everyone got on the back of a flatbed and was in the parade. They took turns watching each other and throwing candy. Clark had soot on his ear from putting out a forest fire in Washington that morning. He'd just typed up his article about a bear cub saved by Superman. He waved the paper and said, "Patriotism swells in the heart of the American bear," because he was a dork and she just couldn't take it.

She curled her hand in the lapel of his cheap suit, and she pulled him in for a kiss.

Someone whistled, and she didn't care. This was what it meant. Just this.

She'd investigate the rest later.

~~~~

Welcome to the Planet

He grinned at Lois every morning when he put a cup of coffee on her desk.

The first time he did it, she said, "What? What!"

He shook his head and did not repeat, "Welcome to the Planet."

Somewhere they were building a statue of him. Somewhere that statue was being defaced. There were blog sites calling for him to be sent home. There was a small cult dedicated to him upstate, which annoyed Ma to no end.

Pa had been right and he'd been wrong.

Some mornings, Lois would roll her eyes and say, "This isn't Smallville, Clark. Welcome to the big city."

Sometimes, he'd say, "New York is bigger," but only if he had an apple. Lois was fun to rile up.

Others he'd keep going until she laughed. Until someone told them, "Get a room already." Which for some reason, only made them laugh more.


	4. The Mother City

Lois' plane circled over Metropolis for the third time. It wasn't an emergency. Unless you counted a broken down truck on one of the runways that quickly had planes backing up over Metropolis International.

Lois leaned her head against the window and looked down at her city. It looked small from here, but she'd shoved her way up from the city desk. There wasn't much that was small about her city. There was a saying that everyone should live in New York, but leave before you got too hard, and San Francisco, but leave before you went soft. As far as Lois was concerned, Metropolis was just right. Metropolis meant Mother City, and she was Lois' city. The home that she'd chosen after years of moving from city to city with Dad's every new deployment.

That was when she spotted Clark flying by. He waved. Behind her, she could hear a little boy whispering excitedly to his mother. He was excited to be going to Superman's city.

Lois smiled.

Maybe she was going soft.

She was jet lagged. She'd been wearing the same clothes for twenty-two hours. She had marks along the sides of her head from where the helmet strap rubbed against her jaw for three months. Her skin itched from the flak jacket that she wasn't wearing for the first time since she'd been embedded with the Kurdish fighters in northern Syria. That might have been sand fleas.

Lois really needed a shower.

Lois filled the rest of the flight time by researching maintenance records for Metropolis International, because seriously, if her phone made the plane fall out of the sky, she'd eat the phone. She copied Clark on the story, because she thought she might have used the word incompetence one too many times. Also, her phone thought she'd misspelled it, but wouldn't tell her how it should be spelled.

Clark was waiting on the other side of customs when she finally got out. He said, "You know you're supposed to leave your phone in airplane mode while in the air."

"Because you fly coach all the time," said Lois.

He shrugged. "I could have flown you."

She paused before stretching up for a kiss. She whispered against his lips. "Right. Bugs in my teeth and half frozen." She pulled away and wiggled her eyebrows. "Sounds fun."

She didn't thank him for not saving her the three months she'd been over there. They'd talked and agreed that he couldn’t fight the wars of the world. That even appearing there could have consequences. The only thing that kept Putin from having a melt-down at the G-20 summit was Superman kept his heroics to burning buildings and foundering tankers.

She'd spent the entire three months knowing that if something had gone wrong, Clark would have done something that would have had consequences. That hadn't stopped her from going. She had to be who she was.

She looked at the skyline in the distance. "It's good to be home."


	5. American Gothic

"Lois, why don't we stop at that nice farmhouse over there and ask if they saw anything," muttered Lois.

Clark sighed and did not melt the rifle currently pointed at them. "You thought McMillan was assassinated by his mob associates."

"Yeah, that's where you should be focusing your attention right now, Clark." Lois held up her hands. She smiled brightly at the woman currently holding a pitchfork in their direction. "I'm sure this is all a misunderstanding."

Clark scanned the floor under the barn. There wasn't a space ship. There were quite a few bodies. "Uh, Lois."

Lois wasn't paying attention. She'd grabbed the rifle, slamming the stock into the old man's head, and was pointing it at the woman with a competent click. "Didn't anyone ever teach you that guns are distance weapons? Now put down the pitchfork, and both of you face down on the ground with your hands behind your heads."

Clark looked at Lois. He batted his eyes. "My hero."

"Oh, shut up," she said. "Go…" she shrugged in the direction of the barn door, "someplace where there's some signal and… call the authorities, and seriously we need to come up with some code words."

He hesitated. She glared at him. "Go on. I'll be fine with American Gothic here." He went into the trees and took off as gently as he could. He was back as soon as the call was over.

Lois didn't really need saving though.


	6. Agony Columns

Clark had thrown his glasses onto the paper.

She knew what the article said. She'd written it. The bold subhead Agony stood out in sharp relief. She was just glad that his glasses blocked the image of the self-satisfied politician going on about how there was nothing to be done.

She sat down next to him on the couch. He pulled her into his arms, his head resting on hers. She whispered into the open buttons of his shirt, "You can't save everyone."

His breath was a small breeze over her hair. He was always so careful. "Jor-el said that I could lead people into the light, but everything I do just seems to…" He sighed another warm gale.

She pulled away. "Today, we lit a candle. Tomorrow, we'll light a few more."

He looked tired. "I just wish I could…"

"Remake the world. Light a bonfire. Turn on the sun." At his faint nod, she kissed his cheek. "Hey, you're the one who reads Plato. If you did that, everyone would just be blind from the sudden light."

At least he didn't look so miserable any more. "You were actually listening when I talked about the Allegory of the Cave."

"Clark, I am a Pulitzer prize winning journalist." She snuggled into the warmth of him. Outside the harsh wind rattled at the window. "Yes, I listened when you talked."


	7. Coffee Time

Clark frowned at the coffee. It had gone cold.

He'd actually expected Lois to stumble out of bed an hour ago. He'd arranged the papers where Lois was not just reporting the news, but making it. Non Superman news. He'd brewed and poured coffee. Italian roast. He'd hand crushed the beans to keep the noise down. Splash of milk and no sugar. He'd even put out a fully charged mp3 with her victory playlist on it.

He heard the sounds of movement. He gave the coffee a quick zap with his heat vision. Lois stumbled out of her room. Her hair was lopsided. She had a mark on her cheek because she would fall asleep reading.

She looked at him and mumbled. "Too early," and went into the bathroom.

He straightened the newspaper again, and kept her coffee warm.


	8. Warm and Cozy

She woke up feeling warm. There was a mini-sun at her back. She snuggled back into Clark. They'd been awake for three days living on caffeine, but they'd cracked it. Exposed what those scumbags were dumping into the bay.

They hadn't even come close to dying. Just fallen together onto the couch.

She should plug in her phone. She should get off the couch and go to bed. She should kick Clark out into the cold cruel world that he wanted to save.

She pulled the coat covering them higher and snuggled back into the warmth of him.


	9. Mason Jar Lightning

"I will kill you for this," smiled Lois between very, very grit teeth. He could hear them grinding. Her face was softly lit by the Christmas lights glowing from the mason jars that lit up the County Fair after dark.

"I'm not sure that's possible," said Clark. He swung her out onto the cement slab standing in for a dance floor, scattering straw.

"When I said I wanted to go dancing, I did not mean square dancing," said Lois.

Then first notes of "Ashokan Farewell" mourned their way off the strings of the fiddle. Clark pulled Lois into a waltz as her expression transformed into something almost soft.

He whispered in her ear. "Some investigative journalist. You didn't even notice their playlist is all music from your favourite documentary."

She sighed happily. "The Civil War," and they danced to the music of a still frame age.


	10. The Apartment of Solitude

Lois stopped in the door. "This is your apartment?" She looked at it in disbelief. She poked her head outside again to assure herself she had come to the right tenement. She looked inside again at the airy space.

Clark did not blush. "I may have remodelled a little." He rubbed behind his head. "I may have helped some of my neighbours too."

Lois cracked open the top on the bottle of screw top wine she'd brought and poured it in a plastic cup. "Maybe a little."


	11. Nietzschean Superwoman All Wrapped Up in a Red Cape

Lois looked around the bathroom and remembered the thing she'd told herself not to forget when she'd gone in there. But seriously, all she'd been able to think about after Clark fished her out of the frozen lake was a hot shower.

She'd had her shower. What she lacked were dry clothes. She could hear Clark puttering around in her kitchen. He was probably making hot cocoa, or possibly chicken soup from scratch. It was hard to tell with Clark sometimes.

She had four options.

Lois could put her cold wet clothes back on. She cursed the fact that her alien boyfriend had been raised well and actually did the laundry once a week. Who came over and cleaned. Who did that? Normally, she'd have had a pile of dirty clothes in here.

There was also the choice to walk around her apartment wrapped in a ratty green towel that had seen better days. That option screamed failure to plan.

There was the streak across her apartment option, but that was even more embarrassing than the towel.

There was also option number four. The sheet that was the only thing in the clothes hamper, after she'd shoved it there that morning, when Clark came over to pick her brain about Congressman Skinner. Well, and bring her a bagel and coffee, and…

"Pull yourself together, Lois. You have a Pulitzer." She wrapped herself in her red flannel sheet, and emerged from her bathroom like a boss.

Clark almost dropped the soup and tea. If he hadn't been a godlike alien from another world, he would have. As it was his expression was priceless.

"What?" She walked over and took the mug from him, which wasn't entirely easy without dropping the sheet, but she managed.

He tilted his head and looked at the large Superman S sewn onto her bright red flannel sheet. He put down the soup. "You look good in my cape."

"My cape, you can wear your own cape." She tied it off like a toga, because at this point his expression was too hilarious to pass up.

Clark's soup was delicious.


	12. What Dreams Are Made Of

Sometimes he dreamed about it.

Not about that final moment with Zod. That was a feeling in the palms of his hands and a sound. No, that was a lie. He had that dream too, but it was important that he hold onto that dream. He needed to remember. To find a different choice.

But there are other dreams as he napped in the remnants of an ancient ship. While he'd lay there trying to sleep, and think about the stranger who was his biological father. He wondered what his biological mother's face looked like. If he had her eyes. What they looked like as she put him in the ship. He thought about Moses choosing the Egyptians when he went for a Sunday visit with Ma.

He thought about that before he fell asleep.

In his dreams, he was standing behind Lois and they're looking down at the Earth. In dreams, he'd found his people.

The same was true while following Lois in pursuit of Truth and Justice. He'd think about Ma and Pa. The American way. He was an immigrant after all.


	13. Standing on the Feet of Giants – a Kiss

Her Father closed the door behind him, and Lois almost collapsed. But she was made of sterner stuff than that. She'd faced down gunrunners and dictators and a megalomaniacal alien general and his crazy hench aliens.

Now she'd survived Thanksgiving dinner with her alien boyfriend, her sister, her sister's questionable boyfriend, her parents and Clark's Mother. There'd only been one tight lipped argument between Dad and Lucy over life choices, which Clark, in one of the bravest acts she'd ever seen, had averted disaster by spilling his wine and in a clumsy "save" flipped the bowl of cranberries into the wall.

She looked at the stain on her wall. "They will never let you live that down."

"Yeah." His eyes were wrinkled. He was laughing at himself again.

She couldn't help it. "I never thought anyone like you could exist."

He looked at her. "That's funny. I was going to say the same thing."

There was nothing for it but to climb onto his feet, and kiss him.

So, she did.

**Author's Note:**

> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


End file.
